thatgamecompany Talks Journey Death Threats, Journey PS Vita Port, Journey Sales, the PS4, and Much More

July 2, 2013
Written by Jason Dunning

Shortly after thatgamecompany revealed that they’re finally receiving royalties for Journeyon PS3, Jenova Chen, Co-Founder and Creative Director at thatgamecompany, told The Telegraph that “it seems like the Journey sales are not going away.” Considering that it constantly shows up in the top 10 every month, and it goes on sale often, they probably won’t go away for some time.

Then, in an interview with Family Gamer TV, Jenova he talked about chances of Journey being ported to the PlayStation Vita, like Flower is, by saying he doesn’t “know whether [Sony] can port Journey to the PS Vita because it is pretty SPU saturated.” Since the decision of a port lies solely with Sony, and they’d have to hire another developer, there’s always a chance it could happen.

Looking at their mysterious upcoming game, Jenova talked about where they are in development:

It’s been almost a year now and we are still in a very pre, pre-production mode. It’s always been the pattern of ThatGameCompany that we spent 75 per cent of time doing R&D and a smaller portion of time on production. When we go for a particular goal we have to do a lot of trial and error. It can feel like you are reaching out in the fog trying to find something.

He then continued by discussing what we can expect from it:

The next game after Journey is like, ok we’ve done it with strangers on the internet, can this also happen among people who know each other. It’s a natural evolution of everything we are doing.

Our goal is always to make games that can move people, that are designed for everybody so the whole family should be able to play it together and that bring people together and really move them in a way. It feels like the history of the studio and everything we do is slowly heading towards that direction.

Cloud and Flower are very much egocentric about my own expression, Flow is more utilitarian and Journey is more about collaboration between various creative voices in the team. Our next game is going to be something that will relate to a wide audience on a human level. It is very exciting to see my own maturing and the team’s maturing and I’m curious to see what this next game could be.

Because of all this news about thatgamecompany coming to light, the company’s Twitter account was extremely busy today. For a list of all the interesting news to come out of those tweets, read on:

Knowing that thatgamecompany’s in development title will be multi-platform, they said, “Unless [Microsoft] would change the rules on self-publishing or give us special treatment we can’t make games on the Xbox One.”

Contrary to some reports, “We have not announced that we are working on an exclusive #XboxOne #Kinect title. @JenovaChen simply said that it looks interesting.”

A couple reasons as to why they’re going multiplatform include “money and the fact that millions more can play our games.”

Though multiplatform is a certainty for their next game, thatgamecompany did say, “Our next game won’t be exclusive to any single platform, but it could be on one console, but open to PC, Android, iOS, Vita, 3DS, etc. We’re keeping our focus on having it multi-platform.”

thatgamecompany hasn’t announced what those platforms might be yet, but they did say “it’ll be a while until it’s released.”

When someone asked if their game will be on PS3 or PS4, they replied with, “it will more likely be on PS4.”

Addressing why it will be so long before we hear anything about the project, it’s because “we announced Journey way too early.”

Development time “might take longer [than] Journey, but it certainly will take longer than Flower. We received death threats at the end of developing #JourneyPS3, and a lot of people were getting really annoyed by the non-stop PR through us and PlayStation.”

“Our current game has already passed 12 months of development.”

What takes so long is “trying to form the style of the game and then figuring out what exactly to do. It’s going better than with Journey, though.”

Adding to that previous fact, “it’s still really early, but we’re making decent headway.”

The PS4 “would make development easier, but the difficulty in our development more so comes from crafting new experiences.”

On the subject of Journey sales, “We’re not at liberty to discuss official numbers, but it did sell very well compared to other downloadable games on PSN.”